Improving optical performance of ultraviolet light-emitting diodes by incorporating boron nitride nanoparticles

Abstract

Ultraviolet light-emitting diodes (UVLED) are a new type of device in the LED development; however, the radiant efficacy of UVLEDs is still too low to satisfy the requirements of applications. In this study, boron nitride nanoparticles (BN NPs) are incorporated into the UVLED’s silicone encapsulation to improve the optical output power. This BN NPs-based package shows an increase in optical flux of 8.1% compared with silicone-only encapsulation when the BN NP concentration is optimized at 0.025 wt%. By analyzing the BN NP film, adding the BN NPs into silicone leads to a decrease in transmittance but an increase in haze. Haze and transmittance has an excellent negative correlation with increasing BN concentration under 365 nm. The moderate BN NP concentration maximizes the scattering performance from haze while maintaining high transmittance. Therefore, this enhanced light output is attributed to scattering that reduces optical losses from total internal reflection at the silicone–air interface. By using the new BN-based structure in green and red quantum dot devices, an increase radiant flux of the device is observed, 9.9% for green LED and 11.4% for red LED. This indicates that BN NPs have potential prospects in the application of UV LEDs used as excitation sources for quantum dots.